Against odds, Sacramento mother sees son graduate

“’The most important thing about my mom is she knows about science.’ I think we had a clue way back in first grade.”

Ann Silberman laughs and looks at her son, Matt Kempster, who is now 17. The biology specialist on Mira Loma High School’s Science Bowl team, Kempster and his four teammates won yet another national championship just weeks ago. A senior, Kempster is now on the brink of graduation.

Anyone envisioning a future in high schools where traditional stereotypes of bullying, academics, and social hierarchies are turned on their heads may need look no further than Sacramento’s Mira Loma High School.

Four years ago, Silberman’s goal was to see her then-14-year-old son graduate from high school. And, if she was lucky, maybe make his bed in his college dorm room, or do his laundry.

“When I was diagnosed,” says Silberman, “it was graduation that I was kind of wanting to live to see.”

In 2010, the breast cancer she had been battling for the past six years had progressed into Stage IV, metastatic cancer to her liver. For many, that prognosis is not only terminal, but can leave patients dead within months.

Silberman has faced death on many occasions during the past several years. After a surgery that removed half of her liver, she contracted an antibiotic-resistant infection, CDIF, that went septic. It appeared that her only option was to have her liver removed—an operation that has an 80% death rate.

“I was near death,” she says. “It was, like, minutes away.”

But before death could get to her, the antibiotics did.

“(They) kicked in at the right time. I was really lucky.”

Silberman sits at a shaded picnic bench in Carmichael Park with her husband, Doug Kempster, and Matt, flipping through a half-finished album that houses some of Matt’s first school assignments and photographs, reading some of Matt’s earliest writing. Much of it has to do with his mother. Much of it has to do with science. The most exuberant passages of carefully scripted graphite letters describe the intersection of the two—mom, and science.

Now, Matt explains, his mom still helps with school—in a slightly different capacity.

“Whenever I have some difficulties,” he says, “she’ll say, ‘Okay, solve the problem. I’ll help you however I can.’ But most of the time, she’s just encouraging. She realizes she can’t really help me on my math homework.”

Matt glances at his mother with a grin.

“I’m sorry!” quips Ann, as she and Matt laugh.

While the documentation of their early dynamic is about Matt learning from his mother, a reciprocal process of teaching has developed. The concurrent journeys of Silberman’s tempestuous sickness and Matt’s exceptional development have brought Silberman a new understanding of her son.

“I am in awe of my son,” says Silberman. “I shouldn’t tell him this, because then he’ll never clean his room—but there have been times when he did not know if he would have a mother the next morning. And he’s kept on. Straight A’s—not only straight A’s, but a 4.6 GPA, all the way through high school. He never missed a beat.”

Thanks to Matt’s chemistry teacher and Science Bowl coach, James Hill, throughout the team’s progress at the Washington, D.C.-based national competition, Silberman did not miss a beat either.

“I was constantly sending her updates, and she was so excited,” Hill says.

Hill met Silberman before he taught Matt, because she was the principal’s secretary at Mira Loma High School. Hill and Silberman have maintained a unique connection while Silberman has fought breast cancer, in part due to Hill’s personal link to the disease.

“I lost my mom to breast cancer 11 years ago,” Hill says, his voice breaking as he speaks. “I dealt with it as an adult. Matt has dealt with it as a teenager, so I can only imagine the trials and tribulations that he’s experienced.”

Matt’s accomplishments, both in the classroom and on the Science Bowl, have been motivated in part by his mother’s struggle.

“I’ve done a lot of it for her,” he says. “From the moment she told me she wanted to see me graduate, it’s at least part of it—to get there, to get to that moment, for her.”

Hill expressed a similar fulfillment in the happiness the team’s victory created for Silberman.

“Now that they’ve done this well, it’s just an extra bonus for everybody—especially for Ann. I really loved doing that for her—to see the joy that she’s received through all of this acknowledgement and her son’s success.”

Silberman’s drive to live stems, at least in part, from an unshakable drive to remain a part of her son’s journey.

“He’s just a motivated, dedicated, amazing individual,” she says. “And watching that—I don’t want to stop watching it. I want to see what he does in life. It’s kept me going, for sure.”

For Matt, his mother’s sickness can be a motivator, but without solely defining their connection, or coloring his outlook.

“It’s not something that’s always on your mind,” says Matt, who then clarifies, “It can’t be something that’s always on your mind, because if it is, then you’re focused on the negative parts of life. If it’s something that’s always on your mind, then you’re not going to be able to get into the good, what is good in your life.”

In addition to remaining at the core of her son’s support and motivational system, and guiding him to see “the good,” Silberman has created a community of her own. Butdoctorihatepink.com, a blog that began as a means of informing her family and friends on her progress with the disease, now hosts several million site visitors.

In her writing, Silberman juggles silliness and solemnity, biology and philosophy.

“She addresses this difficult subject in a heads-on approach that I think shocks people sometimes,” says Hill.

As Silberman discusses death, she is astoundingly real; she speaks from a place that could only be reached by someone who has voyaged to the outermost bounds of iterative possibility when it comes to mortality. We feel no vibrations of self-pity or disingenuous bravado in her tone, as she looks the possibility of her own death in the face.“Death can be funny,” Silberman says. “I always say, terminal illness is funny, just not for very long! There are a lot of stupid things that happen to you—hilarious things that happen to you—and they’re ridiculous, and if you don’t see that part of it, then you’re just going to suffer.”

“She has a great gift with language,” Hill says. “I’m just really amazed and really proud of what she’s done with her blog.”

Silberman is not afraid to go places that often remain untouched within the discussion of terminal illness.

“You have to look for the amusing, funny parts of everything,” she says, “or it’s just going to be miserable. You have one choice in life—you can have a good time, or you can suffer. I’m going to have as good a time as I can while I’m here.”

Beneath a thankfully shaded canopy of redwood branches, Silberman, her husband, and her son sit together. They are open, happy to discuss issues that would render most people incapable of expression.

A mother, a father, and a son candidly talk, all together, about the terminal disease that one of them faces.

Not only do they do so with cogent, heartrending insight, they do so with the grace and naturalness of an unwavering group of family.

While they have been touched by circumstances that seem to approach the unimaginably painful end of the spectrum of human experience, and they do not deny the reality of those circumstances, the scars, the tracks, the presumably indelible traces of such traumatic experience just are not there. Something has precluded such pain from taking hold -- maybe, that pain has just been so diluted with “the good” that it cannot find a strong footing, cannot permeate the awe and courage that these people find in each other.

They are simply a mother, a father, and a son -- three people who love and support one another, three people who have endured unthinkable hardship and pain, three people whose familial bonds have nonetheless remained unshaken.

“There is nothing in this life more important than your family and your loved ones,” says Silberman. “It’s very simple.”

COVERAGE BEGINS AT 1:30. IT IS GRADUATION SEASON AND THAT MEANS HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS ARE PAR TAKING IN A RIGHT OF PASSAGE. AND THEIR PARENTS. HIGHLIGHTS ONE STUDENT WHOSE GRADUATION WAS A SPECIAL GIFT TO HIS MOTHER. HOW CAN ONE KID WALK ACROSS THE STAGE HOLD SO MUCH MEANING? I WAS NEAR DEATH. IT WAS LIKE MINUTES AWAY. TO ANSWER THAT YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO MATT'S FRESHMAN YEAR. THAT'S WHEN DOCTORS SAID THAT HIS MOTHER'S 6 YEAR BATTLE WITH BREAST CANCER HAD TURNED TERMINAL AND SHE MADE IT HER GOAL TO SEE HIM GRADUATE. MATT'S GOAL STAY TO FOCUSED. IT'S AT LEAST PART OF IT I'VE BEEN DOING IT JUST TO GET THERE TO GET TO THAT MOMENT FOR HER. AND MOM STAYED FOCUS, TOO. TO SEE MATT GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL. I'M SO PLEASED. I CAN'T BELIEVE I DID IT. MATT'S PARENTS SAY HE INSPIRES THEM. HE SETS THE GOAL AND ACHIEVES THE GOAL. I AM IN AWE OF MY SON. AND I SHOULDN'T TELL HIM THIS BECAUSE THEN HE WILL NEVER CLEAN HIS ROOM. BUT HE DESPITE -- THERE HAVE BEEN TIMES WHEN HE DID NOT KNOW IF HE WOULD HAVE A MOTHER THE NEXT MORNING AND HE KEPT ON STRAIGHT A'S BUT 4.6 GPA. HE NEVER MISSED A BEAT. AND THE ORIGINAL GOAL OF MAKING IT TO GRADUATION IS ACCOMPLISHED. NEXT UP CONTINUING THE POSITIVE OUTLOOK. IT'S NOT SOMETHING THAT'S ALWAYS ON YOUR MIND. OF COURSE IT CAN'T BE SOMETHING THAT'S ALWAYS ON YOUR MIND BECAUSE IF IT IS YOU'RE FOCUSED ON THE NEGATIVE PARTS. SO IT'S ON TO CAL TECH IN THE FALL AND MOM IS ALREADY PLANNING HER FIRST VISIT. THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS LIFE MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR FAMILY AND YOU GET CAUGHT UP IN WORK AND THIS PERSON SAID THIS THIS PERSON SAID THAT. IT'S NOT GOING RIGHT AND THEY'RE NOT DOING THEIR JOB. ALL THESE LITTLE THINGS. YOU REALIZE NONE OF THIS MATTERS. YOU COME HOME TO PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE THEM. THAT'S REALLY ALL THE THAT MATTERS. THAT'S VERY SIMPLE. GREAT ADVICE.

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